The Jewish Community High School of the Bay will host a national playwriting competition at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 26. This is the first time the Jewish Plays Project’s annual Jewish Playwriting Contest Live will come to the West Coast.
Five venues across the country will hold 20-minute staged readings from three plays; at the end of session audience members will vote for their favorite. Winning plays will be produced in June at the Festival of New Jewish Theater in New York.
“I’m really excited about the choices we came up with because they speak to San Francisco in terms of our interest in different cultures and the international scene,” said Dylan Russell, chair of the JCSH fine and performing arts department, who is producing the event.
The S.F. readings are: “Belfast Kind,” about a 12-year-old girl in Ireland preparing for her bat mitzvah during conflict between the Catholic and Protestant communities; “Diaspora,” about a woman raised in a Jewish–Catholic household in the Southwest who travels to Israel on an LGBT Birthright trip; and “The Place We Built,” about Jews in Hungary.
JCHS is located at 1835 Ellis Street, S.F. Tickets are $20-$25. For more information, visit www.jewishlearningworks.org.